Just before Christmas we held an open day for the Chefs’ Guild at the truffle-dog training-school in Hampshire. The event was a huge success with talks on the range and diversity of truffle species, truffle cultivation with microscope demonstrations, a fantastic truffle lunch and truffle-training/hunting demonstrations. Mufti, Marion’s prized truffle hound, was really the star of the day. Jose Suter (of the chefs’ guild)  said “This has been an absolutely fascinating and fun day, we can’t wait to come back!”.

Recently, you may have seen several media articles claiming that a new project is being launched in France to clone the black truffle (Tuber melanosporum).  These articles made headlines around the world and led to claims that truffle production will increase with scientists cloning truffles and trees. In fact, such experimentation is not new and has been the source of many projects for at least the past 20 years. Several studies have focused on truffle-strain selection as well as selecting and cloning well-performing host trees.

The dates of the next International Workshop on Edible Mycorrhiza Mushrooms (IWEMM6) have just been released and our very own Dr Paul Thomas will be sitting on the international scientific committee.

In early November 08 we started to collate results from our Welsh plantation, where we are seeing excellent brûlé development (burnt areas around the tree base caused by the truffle growth) just 9 – 12 months after planting. We recorded data from 77 trees and only seven were not yet showing signs of brûlé development. This is really good news as we were not expecting such good development for at least two more years. We are now planning a full vegetation survey across the site as well as biological soil measurements to see what is happening below ground.